Live data from Hacker News

Book prizes don't work how you think

rebeccamakkai.substack.com

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#21
post #20

Everything about the book publishing industry is antiquated. I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce. The real disruption of books haven't really happened. I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything. The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.

I love ebooks and audiobooks. But the fact that I can’t legally lend or sell them (same with steam btw) means that it’s at best a lateral step.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#22
post #10

>1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down. There is room for LLMs to disrupt book judging by being able to read every single book.

The book was rejected because it doesn't say "load-bearing" and "now here's the thing" enough.

[dead]

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#23
post #21
post #20

Everything about the book publishing industry is antiquated. I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce. The real disruption of books haven't really happened. I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything. The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.

I love ebooks and audiobooks. But the fact that I can’t legally lend or sell them (same with steam btw) means that it’s at best a lateral step.

Lending or selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM. A large part of the community thinks having DRM is way worse than not being able to lend or sell.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#24
Except for the prize committees outsourcing roughly the same sets of judges, they work a lot like how you’d expect. The judges pickup a bunch of books and choose the ones they like the most. Since the author makes it clear how subjective the process truly is, you can assume that personal biases play a huge part in how winners are chosen.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#26
post #8

Sorry, I laughed... :) > I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.

It’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#27
post #8

Sorry, I laughed... :) > I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.

I briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy.

And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#28
post #23
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ebooks and audiobooks. But the fact that I can’t legally lend or sell them (same with steam btw) means that it’s at best a lateral step.

Lending or selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM. A large part of the community thinks having DRM is way worse than not being able to lend or sell.

Selling books doesn't require DRM at all. I buy DRM-free books all the time.

As an example: Kobo will tell you, at the bottom of each book's page, if it has DRM or not. And it will happily sell you a book without DRM and let you download it.

Re: Book prizes don't work how you think

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.

I briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy. And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.

Also had a lot less worries about a random bad sector turning up with USB.
Post reply on HN